Welcome to the new home of Wots For Lunch?, feel free to have a look around and let me know what you think.

I’ve migrated posts going back to the beginning of January this year from Letterdash and am thinking of leaving the previous three year’s worth of posts there as a kind of archive. Don’t be too alarmed if things change a little over the next few weeks as I tweak the look and feel to find my perfect fit.

If you have any comments or suggestions please leave a comment or contact me directly via email.

This pasta sauce is a great pantry staple creation: a box of passata, a tin of tuna and a handful of salty capers cooked together for a few minutes and then spooned over pasta. You can completely change the flavour by adding (think chilli, olives and anchovies) or subtracting an ingredient or two.

Have you noticed the seasonal change in the weather recently? In Cape Town the evenings have a slight chill to them signalling the onset of Autumn and I think that is the perfect excuse to create giant pots of warm and comforting soup. Like this Thai flavoured butternut soup I made last night.

I have plenty of leftovers from this month’s daring cooks challenge, so you know some inevitably land up in my lunch box. Both versions seemed more tasty after sitting over night letting all the flavours mingle.

I can’t believe it’s been more than a month since my last blog post. I’m quite upset with myself for allowing this to happen, but I won’t go into all my reasons and excuses for not posting. Instead I’d like to share with you my submission for this month’s Daring Cooks challenge.

The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of MelbournefoodGeek and Jess of Jessthebaker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.

I have made risotto many times before so for me (and I hate to admit this) the real challenge was making the requisite stock from scratch. I used the chicken stock recipe supplied with our challenge and must say was really impressed with the end result. Once I had the risotto base completed I divided it into two and flavoured one half with a combination of sautéed portabellini and oyster mushrooms and a little Geo Watkins Mushroom Ketchup. The other half I flavoured with spicy sausage (debreziner), red pepper and peas. They both came our really well and there where lots of leftovers, some of which found it’s way into my lunch box the next day.